Along L.A. River, Poetic Inspiration

We arrive at the L.A. River, Asian poets wandering at noon. Gravel and stone, water and debris. Huge multicolored graffiti spells out “Frogtown” on the opposite bank.

What I know of the river’s history comes from a plaque in Oros Park. The Tongva Indians named it Western River, Paime Pahite, I tell Huang Yibing. We look at the stagnant dark water in the big concrete gully. Islands of weed, branches and plants float in the concrete channel. Heat rises from the ground where we stand.

Yibing shrugs. “So it’s not the Yangtze,” he says. Then in Chinese, he adds: “But as a kid, I played in these kinds of places, across the railroad tracks, the other side of fences, the parts outside of the town where I was born--Changde, in Hunan province.”

Yibing has written more than 2,000 poems in Chinese, mostly in Hunan, and in Beijing, where he went to school. He’s a post-Tiananmen poet, making art out of everyday life. But in his two years here, he had never written a poem about L.A. Now he was about to leave for a teaching job in Connecticut. I wanted him to see this city’s river, a conduit that connects L.A.’s spread-out communities, east and west. Maybe there would be images for him here.

We snap photos, each of us posing in Huang’s violet-colored sunglasses and my brown leather jacket. We want to look “L.A.” in front of the electric towers, the Metro rail cars on the other side of the river.

Suddenly, I feel alone. I want to bring a rock home, to guard my front door.

“Alone?” Yibing is puzzled. “That’s what I like about L.A.--a writer can be alone with his thoughts and not freeze in winter.”

He wanders off to the floating islands. I lift and turn rocks over, as if they had backs and bellies, heads and tails. My foot hits a broad rock, speckled gray and white granite buried in white gravel. I begin to prod it from the earth. I kneel, and dirt clumps through my fingers as they reveal a wide back, then a protruding bump. It looks like the head of an old turtle or an ancient tortoise.

I call to Yibing and he runs over, feels the stone. “A stone turtle,” he concurs. “A good guardian for you.”

Once home, I wash the stone carefully with a hose. The creature, damp and dark with water, reveals itself, almost softens under my touch. I move it near the front door, into the shade of a nandina bush.

Yibing leaves for the East Coast, his teaching job, and a few days later, an envelope arrives. Inside, written in blue ink, is a poem:

. . . all of a sudden

we find turtle-like rock

or rather, a stone turtle

slowly carrying its body

as if trying to pull itself

(on the verge of annihilation)

out of the flowing sand. . . .

ancient sacred spirit

we meet you

faraway in a foreign land

do you remember still

your once-noble origin and

language? . . .

The stone turtle, it seems, found voice in a Chinese poet who traveled thousands of miles from Hunan to create a poem from sunlight, dirty water and the littered banks of the L.A. River. It’s Yibing’s first poem about living in America.

With my brush and black ink, I paint an eye on the head of the stone turtle, on the side that faces me. An eye of friendship and memory--to all relations of the river.

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Russell C. Leong is the author of “Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories” (University of Washington Press, 2000) and editor of UCLA’s Amerasia Journal.